The report lifecycle#

The best way to understand Reportworq is to start from the end and work backwards, the same way a demo does. Picture what a store manager receives every Monday morning: a personalized email with a short chart and a few AI-written insights on their numbers, and a PDF attached with a table of contents, all specific to their store. Now rewind. How did that get built, and how does it keep arriving every week without anyone touching it?

This page follows one report, a weekly profit-and-loss pack sent to a retailer's stores, through its whole lifecycle: author, parameterize, test, distribute, schedule, monitor. The point is not the individual screens (each has its own how-to) but the shape of the journey.

The starting point: one solid template#

The retailer has 150 stores. Each store manager needs the same statement with their own store's numbers. The instinct is to build 150 files. The aha moment of Reportworq is that you do not: you build one solid source template in Excel, and Reportworq iterates, slices, and personalizes it from there. If one manager needs their view shown a little differently, that is not a new template; Reportworq can hide rows, drop columns, and construct the variation within the tool. One master template, not a folder of near-duplicates.

Author#

Authoring is where you define the report, the template that makes the outputs. You point the report at the source workbook and choose which worksheets it renders, in order. This is the Reports step of the Job Editor and the subject of Your first report, end to end.

At this stage the report exists but is not yet personalized, it would produce the same statement for everyone. The next step is what makes it fan out.

Parameterize#

Parameterizing is the most important idea in the lifecycle. You build the source file so that changing a single cell, say a Store cell from "Store 001" to "Store 002", causes every formula in the workbook to recalculate for that store. You then expose that cell to Reportworq as a parameter.

Now the report is a machine: feed it a store number and it produces that store's statement. Feed it a list of store numbers and it produces one per store. The care you spend here is what lets a single template serve 150 audiences. There is one rule worth knowing early: map the parameter to every worksheet that should replicate with it, even where a worksheet does not display the value. Do that and Reportworq copies those worksheets as a group and rewrites their cross-sheet references to the sibling copies, so a second tab that reads from the first stays correct in every copy. Map it to only one tab and the others will not replicate with it. The details, and the cell, pivot, and specification mappings you can use, are in Parameterize a report.

Test#

Before anything goes out, you preview. The Test step runs the report through the exact production pipeline but suppresses delivery, so nothing is emailed or written to a destination. You generate a preview, run it, download the produced file, and read the log (for example Success - 1 datapoints) to confirm the data resolved and the layout is right. It is your safe dry run: source binding, parameter mapping, and formatting are all exercised without touching a recipient. You saw this step in the first-report tutorial.

Distribute#

Distribution is the last mile, getting the trusted content to where people already work. This is where two things commonly surprise new users:

• One job can produce many formats to many places. You do not need a separate job for the PDF, another for the PowerPoint, and another for the email. A single job can render several output formats and send them to several destinations (email, network folder, SharePoint, Slack, Teams, and more) at once. See Distribution overview and Output formats.
• You usually do not need the bursting screen to burst. Most people assume they must hand-maintain a list of who gets what. In practice you set a parameter to produce one report per item and let its values come straight from your source system, for example an IBM Planning Analytics subset or an attribute on each store, so the output follows the source data and updates itself when the business changes. That is replication, and it needs no burst sets and no Burstable flag. Burst sets exist for the cases replication cannot express, but they are the exception, not the rule. See What bursting is and when you need it.

For the retailer, this is the step that turns one template into 150 personalized emails, each with the right PDF, without a per-store list to maintain.

Schedule#

A report that is ready to run is a report that can run itself. Scheduling is the most underused capability in Reportworq, often because an author is not yet confident the job is dynamic enough to run unattended, which is exactly what the earlier steps build confidence in. Once the weekly P&L is parameterized and tested, you put it on a schedule (Reportworq uses a five-field cron expression) and it delivers every Monday with no manual step.

Scheduling does not have to mean "send automatically." You can schedule a run to hold for delivery, which produces the outputs on cadence but waits for a person to review and release them, the recurring equivalent of running a test and checking it before it goes. See Schedule a job, or run it once by hand with Run a job.

Monitor#

Once a report runs on its own, you watch it rather than drive it. The monitoring surfaces show what is running, what is held for release, and the history of past runs, per report, so you can confirm the Monday send went out, see where its outputs landed, and release anything held for review. When a run fails, the log and the built-in diagnostics explain why. See Track activity and run history and When a job fails.

The loop, not the line#

Laid out in order the lifecycle looks linear, but in practice it is a loop. The template is defined once and reused every cycle. When a number changes at close, you do not rebuild anything; you rerun. When the business reorganizes, a query-driven report follows the new metadata on its own, no workbook edits, no distribution edits. That reuse, one authored template producing thousands of governed, personalized outputs on a schedule, is the whole point.

Where to go next#

• Build the template in Your first report, end to end.
• Make it personalize in Parameterize a report.
• Send it in Distribution overview.
• Automate it in Schedule a job.